Letter D...

We went into this week with a pretty planned out lesson plan ,but like any other Oregon family we just couldn't pass up the gorgeous weather when it came our way. Remember how I mentioned that one of the best parts of homeschooling was that we get to create our own schedule? Weeks like this one really make me appreciate the fact that we can be as flexible as we need to be when things come up. So, although we didn't get to create the sensory box I had in mind for this week or completely cover our "days of creation" bible lesson we had in mind. We did get to spend a majority of our homeschool time outdoors this week, enjoy a play date, and get away for an impromptu family vacation to the mountains.

All in all, we still had one of our better weeks of homeschooling while wrapping up on our letter of the week, the letter D! Our preschooler is completely obsessed with everything and anything dinosaur, needless to say we still managed to crammed this week with every fun filled dinosaur idea we could come up with! We jumped into this week with two fun dinosaur crafts to give his two different sensory experiences: both started with a rough outline of one of his favorite dinosaurs and then he used pasta noodles to create his own version of a dinosaur skeleton on one, while using paints to outline his other dinosaur. Both activities were really based for him to do independently in the morning.

This week we spent a good amount of our week outside to enjoy the nice weather and to give us a little break from our normal routine. This is where we did our workbooks for the week practicing tracing and writing our uppercase and lowercase letter D's. We also took a short walk to our local library since the sun was out to pick out some books to go with our letter of the week, when we came across this little gem:

 

 

I don't know if your local library has anything like this ,but we just recently discovered these little learning kits that are all organized by themes making them a great choice for our unit studies. This little packet was all about dinosaurs, it had books that corresponded with the theme, an educational DVD about them, and a CD that had toddler songs all about dinosaurs. Some further investigation I came to learn that this was just a small learning packet that they have, they also have giant tubs that are actually filled with an entire lesson plan worth of materials for specific themes that include books, videos and Cd's, puppets, and other learning materials. While I still love hunting for the new family favorites in the children's book section, this is honestly a homeschooling goldmine! Honestly, I just can't say it enough: use the local resources available to you, you will seriously be surprised at what you may find!

 

Towards the middle of our week after play dates, we decided to skip the sensory box that I had in mind and do a little letter recognition in our toddler pool instead. This was a really simple idea to make our fun time in the pool also into a learning exercise by filling the pool with different objects, toys, and foam letters. Our preschooler would find the objects that started with the letter D or the actual letters themselves and toss them out of the pool into a bucket.

 

 

While the bible lesson for this week was a bit larger than we had time for, I decided to only do half this week and the other half will be continued into next week (stay in touch for that to be posted in the next couple days). We did manage to wrap up our week with our letter of the week crafts! This week we did a duck for our lowercase D and a dinosaur for our uppercase D:

 

 

Since we were on the go the majority of this week, we took some time to break in our new Melissa and Doug preschool flashcards, these were great for our car ride to the mountains because they are set up in a question and answer type of way that really involves both the parent and the preschooler. 

 

 

Like always we ended the week by adding our own letter D to our very own Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree at home. Check in with us during this upcoming week for our "days of creation" bible lesson post and for some great letter D book recommendations to be coming up in the next couple days. We will be starting in on next letter of the week this Sunday, so keep on the lookout for our letter E activities.

 

Letter C...

We are moving onto the next letter of the alphabet, the letter C! This week we kicked things off with a favorite book in our household and a fun activity to go along with it:

And you can probably guess what activity we chose to go along with our book of the week? Making some fresh oatmeal chocolate chip cookies with my two favorite little chefs. Going with this book's theme I thought it would be fun to add a hands on counting activity involving our own cookie for mouse and some chocolate chips (on a little side note if you use real chocolate chips like we did be prepared to have a few missing by the end of the game or you could cut out some pretend chocolate chips for the game). We would hold up a flashcard with a number on it, have him count out the number and then add that many chocolate chips to his own cookie, it really helped for him to count out the chocolate chips as he was putting them on his cookie. After we finished the game, he got to eat the ten chocolate chips as a reward!

Like the previous weeks we worked on learning, tracing, and writing our uppercase and lowercase C's. We also spent a good amount of time focusing on our colors section of our workbooks, they had some great activities for associating colors with the spelling of the specific color and relating it to the object itself. You could do this with any coloring book or even a print out and have them color code it with you.

Over the middle of the week we shifted back our focus to our letter of the week craft! This has been something that our preschooler really looks forward to during our homeschooling and we talk about what we would like to create together for the week. I try to leave the actual crafts for the week up to our toddler as much as possible not just because I think it helps him feel like he gets to be involved in choosing what he learns ,but also because it is really fun to see what he comes up with. This week we decided to make an uppercase C carrot and a lowercase c cat.

Moving onto the later part of our week we shifted focus to covering our bible lesson which this week we decided to continue with our bible story theme of last week and Easter itself and learn more about the cross. Thanks to our son's Sunday school class he already had a color by numbers picture we hadn't gotten to yet and the focus of it was the cross. We also have been using the Bible for Kids app on our kindle to teach bible stories in a fun, hands on approach.

 

This was our color by numbers cross picture we had our preschooler work on after our bible lesson, the numbers were located at the top and to make it a little easier I marked the color associated with that number right below it. This really helped him figure out that each number meant a specific color and was actually able to do this activity by himself. Something new that I have been meaning to incorporate into each week's post is books we are loving as a family for each letter. Here are some of our own personal favorite's for the letter C:

As always we finished up our week by adding our letter C to our very own personal Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree! Keep on the watch for next week's letter of the week, we are moving onto the letter D which happens to be my son's personal favorite. We will have a fun dinosaur week planned that will be filled with some awesome crafts, a counting game, and a sensory bin with our very own cloud dough recipe!

Letter B...

We are moving onto the next letter of the alphabet this week is the letter B and like the previous week we will be starting off the week with our workbook. If you didn't catch last week's post you can find it here ,it covers what we do in our workbooks throughout the week. Since this week fell on Easter, we chose to start it off with fun bunny themed pancakes (partly for Easter, partly for the letter B, and mostly because they are so cute!)

A fun way to spin off from the fun themed breakfast we had, was to play a game we called bunny tracks: we made little bunny footprints throughout our homeschool area and labeled half of them with a capital B and the other half with lower case B's. Then we instructed our preschooler to do different activities from one bunny footprint to the next, like: hopping, turning in circles, crawling, etc. This was a really fun, simple way to get our toddler active while learning to recognize the letter B. (I will be posting a printable for this game soon!) This week we turned our attention to our weekly letter crafts:

Capital B butterflies as well as capital B birds that both our toddlers participated in making this week. We focused on tying in the life process of butterflies and relating it into our bible lesson this week on the resurrection of Christ. Like I always say utilize your community resources, we really utilize our local church we attend and our son's preschool Sunday school class where he did his weekly bible story craft of creating their very own tomb's for Jesus to rise from (this all fell into Easter Sunday ,but we made it part of our entire weekly lesson plan). And of course like our previous week, we ended our lesson plan by adding our letter B to our very own personal Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree.

Letter A...

If you are anything like me and spend a good amount of the night (obviously in that mommy downtime) on Pinterest, then you have probably seen letter of the week or even letter of the day based activities. That is exactly the route we have chosen to go and here is why: they are fun and I feel learning, especially for toddlers has to be fun or they just won't retain it. They can also be as simple or complex as you want them to be and can insanely creative, they also help involve a large range of different ideas into your lesson plans. Starting off our letter of the week miniature units is you guessed it, the letter A.

Our week usually kicks off with a page out of our workbooks that we mentioned earlier on this blog, if you missed it you can catch it here. The workbook we have mainly focuses on tracing the letter, then writing the letter itself, and then recognizing objects/words that start with that letter. It has small activities to go with certain letters, like coloring by letters or matching objects.

During the week we continue practicing writing our capital and lowercase A's on the dry erase board we have. We continue to use simple games during the week to strengthen his recognition of the letter, here are some of our favorite weekly rotations:

Using our Melissa and Doug magnetic letter set, this set has both uppercase and lowercase letters. A few simple ideas for using the magnetic letters in a fun way is putting them in a shallow tub with rice, it turns it into a searching game and once they find the letter they can pair them with their lowercase or uppercase partner. We also set all the magnets out on our floor and have our preschooler find the uppercase and lowercase set of A's.

Another great activity is to get two small bins or bowls and label one with a capital A and the other with a lowercase a. You can then make a handful of small cards that have either of the letter's on them and have your own preschooler sort them into the appropriate bins. A few other simple ideas would be to make your own letter search on a piece of paper, have your child circle all the hidden A's they can find. You can also make a list with your preschoolers help of all the animals, plants, foods, etc. Alongside these simple do it yourself activities we like to do a craft out of the letter itself to get a little bit of arts and crafts into our week. This week we made:

Alligator for our capital A.

Apple for our lowercase a.

 

We also incorporate a bible lesson that goes along with the letter we are focusing on, this week we learned about Noah's Ark with our preschool bible and thanks to Bible for Kids app we have on our Kindle tablet. It made the story interactive which made it easier for our son to retain what he was leaning. After the bible lesson was such a hit we decided to create our own Ark's to tie in the lesson altogether and talked about all the sets of animals that we were going to put onto our Ark's, with a great emphasis on animals that started with the letter A.

 

 





I cannot emphasize this enough: use your communities resources for adding to your own homeschool routine during the week. We like to utilize our local library by attending story time and using our own library card to check out books that fall into our letter of the week category. I don't know about you ,but my toddler loves the responsibility of checking out library books and returning them at the end of our week. At the end of our week we complete our lesson by adding our A to our very own Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree.

Learning our alphabet..

The main focus of our year has been to really learn the alphabet and to recognize letters even if they are out of sequence and be able to tell if it is a capital or lowercase letter. After some exploring and considering how our preschooler would learn best, we agreed that a letter of the week focus would be the best approach. The entire theme of our year is from one of our favorite books:

 

If you do not already have this book as part of your collection then I highly suggest you go out and purchase a copy. We read it almost every day thanks to our preschool theme and because it has a really fun, playful approach to the alphabet. Even our younger toddler loves reading it day after day. We decided to create our own Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree out of construction paper in our homeschool area that we add our letters to each week after we feel we have mastered them. This is what our own personal tree looks like currently and as you can see it is at toddler level for easy access of our little preschooler.

Each week we focus one letter of the alphabet, we create a craft out of each letter both uppercase and lowercase, we tie in a specific them to correspond with that specific letter (depending on the theme of the letter we pick, our week might run over into an additional week to cover everything), and we find activities to focus on that letter/theme. A good majority of my posts for the next couple months will contain in depth breakdowns of our letter of the week lesson plans and themes, if you are interested in seeing how we create those. These posts will also include craft ideas we choose to go with for that week, any small field trips we plan, bible lessons that fit into our theme, and what books really tie the week all together. So, be on the look out for those in the very near future.

Our homeschool corner...

Like many families who choose to homeschool, we are also limited on space available in our cozy home to create an area just for learning and like many homeschoolers we created our homeschool area in our kitchen. The kitchen was really the only reasonable option we had since we spend most of our days in the downstairs of our house and the living room has already been overtaken by a large play area for our toddlers. That left the us with our kitchen, which really did make sense because it has a clear view into our living room so I can see our "little princess" playing while our "wild thing" works on his lessons. We also spend a good part of our day in the kitchen as I also did when I was a child and that was something that I really wanted to pass down to my children was the love that a kitchen can really hold. As for our little homeschool area we decided to keep it as organized as possible and really wanted it to appeal to a toddler right now with fun pictures, easy access, and bright playful colors. It is still a constant work in progress ,but here is what we have as of right now.

In our general area we have the alphabet border and we used dinosaur shape references (to especially appeal to our son who loves dinosaurs) both of which we found at our local dollar store.

The bulletin board just below the shape references is from Ikea and is used mainly to hang our craft of the week or pamphlets we have from Sunday school. The small bar below is has containers that usually hold materials we use on a daily basis like our pencils, markers, etc. They are really easy to lift off the bar for our toddler to get them down on his own (unfortunately they aren't pictured right now because they are in the dishwasher being sanitized again).

This is right below the bar that holds our preschoolers materials, it was another Ikea purchase. We use this magnetic board almost daily with our magnetic letters and numbers, to hang pictures, or for some magnetic puzzles we have. The three empty bins to the left usually hold small items like pom poms and other small materials we use.

 

Lastly, this is our little homeschool corner all tied together. The table is perfect height for our toddlers and gets use during meals as well as during school times. The little bookshelves are also from Ikea. They were originally spice racks ,but they are the perfect size for children's books and give our toddlers access to books at all times. The small organization bin on wheels is where we store a good part of our school materials that we use throughout the week. It was a simple solution for the time being to keep all our materials in one area and off of our kitchen table that can become quickly cluttered by all of our work. The little tree you see on the wall with the letters is our own personal Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree that ties into our weekly lesson plans that we are currently working on, I will be posting more about this next.

Homemade play dough recipe

Here is a tried and true play dough recipe that I have continued to use with my children as they are growing up. There are many recipes for play dough out there and a big difference between many of them is whether it calls for the recipe to be cooked or not. Personally, I prefer the cooked version just because that is the version I grew up knowing and it has worked quite well for my family. All you need is:

1 cup flour
2 tsp. cream of tartar
2 tbsp. cooking oil
1 cup water
1/2 cup salt (this is optional, it just makes it taste bad so toddlers won't be tempted to eat it)
Other options are to add food coloring if you would like or even essential oils to your play dough for different sensory effects.

Mix your dry ingredients together first in a pot on the stove. Then add your wet ingredients to the pot and mix thoroughly. (If you do choose to add food coloring or essential oils, you need to combine it in a bowl with your other wet ingredients before adding it to your pot) Stir over medium heat until mixture forms into a ball. Let it cool on a baking sheet and then knead until it is smooth. Store your play dough in an air tight container, it will stay good up to 4-6 weeks.

How to get started?

Although we have only just recently began our homeschooling preschool adventures, lately I have been asked what our normal routine is and what we do as far as curriculum. I feel like the biggest obstacle we faced was sorting through the overwhelming amounts of information there is nowadays on homeschooling. As a mom who has been there, spending endless hours searching the internet late at night and purchasing one too many books on homeschooling to find all the answers I could possibly need. Save yourself the confusion! Pick what your goals for the year are and go from there, it really is as simple as that. For our preschool year we decided our focus would be on the following:

• Learning the alphabet and being able to write each letter
• Learning to count to 20
• Developing fine motor skills like using scissors, holding pencils correctly, using glue, etc.
• Incorporating bible stories into our daily routine
• Developing gross motor skills by plenty of exercise, swim lessons, tots sports teams, etc.
• Learning life skills and becoming more independent in them like using the bathroom, getting ourselves dressed, pouring our own drinks, and simple chores around our home
• And lastly learning about our community with experiences like field trips to the local fire station, farmer's market, trips to the zoo, or even just a trip to the library

I have never wanted to completely recreate a classroom inside of my home. Rather I wanted to make learning and education a part of our lifestyle, including it in playing and everyday tasks. This is where it becomes a great idea to get some kind of idea on what type of approach you want to use for teaching curriculum of any kind.  Remember all those book purchases I made on homeschooling that I mentioned earlier? Well, there is one book that I just couldn't rave enough about is:

 

Seriously, of the handful of books I read a majority of them only briefly touched on homeschooling preschoolers (and by briefly I mean maybe a page or two). This book really just helped me realize all the different styles of education there are to choose from and which philosophy you feel closest to. Then taking that and working it to fit to your own child's personal learning style. Out of all the information available I found this so helpful because who would of know that there were so many approaches to learning out there? For my family we found that an eclectic mix with unit studies and a bit of unschooling would be a great fit for us. As far as preschool curriculum this year we decided to come up with our own curriculum based on using the resources we already had available to us. Here is a peek into what we have come up with.

 

Workbooks:

These are some basic preschool workbooks that we have for during our school week that we purchased from our local Target. They cover a bit of everything from learning the alphabet, writing, numbers, matching, patterns, and basics.

 

 

 

Reusable materials:

I can't say it enough, especially if you have multiple children like me that when it comes to materials you want to find ones that are reusable instead of a one time deal like the workbooks I mentioned above. These dry erase booklets were something given to us at some point and the dry erase board for writing was a dollar store find that is truly awesome. Honestly, save yourself some money and go this route for part of your supplies.

 

 

 

As far as the rest of our preschool supplies would all fall into a hands on learning category because let's face it learning, especially at this age should be fun! Here are some of our materials we have on hand.

Magnetic letters and numbers from Melissa and Doug: These get a lot of use in our household and I absolutely love them because they are made out of real wood rather than some of the plastic alternatives, so they really are durable throughout the years.

 

 

Lacing cards, also from Melissa and Doug: These have really helped with developing small motor skills and hold up surprisingly well to all the use they receive. Also comes in handy for a quite afternoon activity while our daughter naps.

 

 





Clothespins: I saw this idea while browsing on Pinterest one night and loved the idea of it! We wrote on clothespins uppercase letters, lowercase letters, we have some that are numbered, and another set that are colored. These get used really frequently because of the hands on experience they give our son and that he can do these activities more independently.

Flashcards: I think these really go without saying because even if you aren't homeschooling, if you have toddlers then I am sure you have a set of these lying around your home. We had these sets given to us over time and incorporate them into our days (especially on days where we are really just not feeling any homeschooling).

 

 

Then there are the rest of our materials like craft supplies that would include children's safety scissors, colored paper, crayons, glue sticks, etc. We also use puzzle, pattern blocks, a wide variety of children's books both from our own personal collection and the local library, and of course play dough. We create our play dough from scratch at home, here is the recipe. And that is just a little peak into what our curriculum and materials look like. I will be going more into detail on what our actual preschool lesson plans look like and how we break up the lessons over the year in my next post.



Why we homeschool?

Somewhere between all the looks of "Is she crazy?" and the never ending questions of how will I ever give my children the socialization that they need, there always remains the question of why do we choose to homeschool our children? And while I will definitely give to you that on some days I feel slightly insane in all of this. It truly started out as a lack of options for preschool that quickly turned into just not the right options for preschool for our family. Honestly, the answer is truly simple: our son. Not exactly the answer you were expecting I bet and while I, myself have read many blogs that go on with an endless list of reasons why they are against traditional school choices, I will not be doing that. As any parent can agree when it comes to your children, every single thing you choose in their lives and yours is very personal decision that doesn't come lightly. My choice was really that simple, it all came down to my son and who he is as an individual.

I am beyond blessed already to be a stay at home mother with both of our children and when we looked into the time that our children would actually spend in school compared to how much time our children spend at home, well it's no secret that the larger portions of their lives are spent here in our home. That's when my husband and myself agreed that it just made sense to go this route. I was already home with both of our toddlers, that wasn't changing anytime in the near future. So the question of why do we choose to homeschool our children quickly changed to why not homeschool our children?! We just started our journey off the beaten path to our own version of homeschooling and the best advice I ever received in general for this was "It can take awhile to fall into a routine that works for your family." When my friend told me it could take awhile ,she meant even years! Years, seriously? Yes, you read that right and I was just as shocked the first time I heard it as well. Once I really dove into all that homeschooling was, it didn't sound so shocking. There really is a lot involved in going this route, even when just starting with preschool that I just wasn't aware of. Just figuring our where and how to get started is a whole other topic in itself (keep on the lookout for my next post on how I started).

You might of recalled how I mentioned that there always seems to be an endless amount of people sharing why the choose not to go the traditional public or private school route and how I would not be doing that myself? I always feel like it comes off a little too negatively sometimes and honestly, I just lack any experience in my children ever going that route. So, instead of doing that I will be sharing my slightly smaller list of why I think homeschooling is seriously awesome! Here is my top ten list of why homeschooling works for our family:

1. I get to spend my entire day with our toddlers! I know exactly where they, what they are doing, and who they are with at all times. How awesome is that?!
2. My preschooler has an actual say in his curriculum throughout the year. We get to spend the extra time really discovering and diving into all the things that he is really interested in without missing any of the main curriculum. My son is completely obsessed with all things dinosaurs and I get to use that as a great theme for part of our school year to really explore it with him.
3. I'm learning right alongside my children! I was humbly surprised at how much I learn in the process of teaching them.
4. Our days are flexible. So when the random park play date pops up, an impromptu trip comes along, or somebody comes down with a bug, it doesn't throw off our entire lesson plans. We just adjust.
5. Pajamas aren't frowned upon in class and there is no morning rush to get out the door in time for a bus or class itself. If you are anything like me, this is a blessing in disguise! I have two early risers who hit the ground running when the wake up and have yet to find the secrets to becoming a morning person myself.
6. The Bible and our religion is incorporated into our school days. While I understand that this isn't something that everyone feels necessary, to my family it is nice to have this included.
7. I now can justify the endless hours I scour on Pinterest each night looking for ideas to incorporate into our school days as part of my curriculum planning.
8. Most of my days are spent elbow deep in paint, glitter, dirt, and play dough. There are almost always markers scribbles on my hands and glue somewhere on me, who could possibly complain?
9. The overflowing amounts of children's books we have taking over every single bookcase in our home is justifiable on so many terms now.
10. Lastly homeschooling has become a lifestyle, it isn't just something that we do part of our days. Everything becomes an opportunity to learn whether it be a simple trip to the grocery store, a hike with the family, or a fun trip to the zoo. It all becomes part of our learning environment.